All of us at Uber Entertainment are always busy. It's a given. But, the last couple of weeks have been "turbo busy," as Brad would describe it. In-between polishing up a lot of incredible features, both the Planetary Annihilation and Toy Rush teams spent major swathes of time planning for their game's showings at PAX East 2014. All the hard work and brain-busting effort paid off, too -- oodles of folks dropped by, said hi, and had an awesome time playing Planetary Annihilation and Toy Rush. With Planetary Annihilation, we set up two groups of four computers and had folks face off against each other in 2v2 matches. Meanwhile, Adam rocked the microphone and casted the matches for everyone observing the action to hear. Over the course of the three-day event, we saw planet smashes and tons of epic plays from rookies that turned pro before our sleep-deprived, but glistening eyes. It was cool, to say the least. The rest of the team back at the office were also busy busting out all the new features you're seeing today in Planetary Annihilation's latest update. In addition to countless optimizations and tweaks, we've added some amazing Gamma-specific features: replays and videos, messaging, friends lists, and yet another advanced command and control feature. Friends Lists, Instant Messaging, and Replays Among other things, Gamma is all about you and your friends. Friends lists, messaging, and replays are a huge step in this direction. The friends list and instant messaging clients live on the right-hand side of your screen. When you're not in games, you can add friends, see if your pals are online, or message them. Replays can be viewed in the new Replay menu available at the main menu screen. Right now, you can search for matches and view them at any time after they end. We've got a great plan to expand this feature by adding the ability to create highlights and user uploading to YouTube. We'll be talking about Replays again pretty soon. Advanced Commander and Control: Line Drawing The day's almost here -- starting now, you can organize units in whatever formations that you desire with two clicks of the mouse and a quick drag. We've also added the ability for you to set the path your units walk with a shift-click. Fighting across entire worlds is easier with this simple, intuitive, and customizable new control. The Rest Of course, this update includes many other fixes, optimizations, and tweaks. Here's a quick hits list. The full patch notes are available, as always, on our forums: As always, we look forward to seeing you guys in the lobby, on our forums, and on our Facebook. Addendum: As a new experiment, we're trying to provide more detailed notes on subsets of the actual checkins, because we know a lot of you like this level of detail. These are lightly edited to make sure they make sense to players, rather than developers, but otherwise are exactly as they appeared in our source control: AI: AI will react to nuke events. AI: AI will build anti nukes in response to nuke being built in the same gravwell. AI: AI will build orbital lasers in response to orbital threat in the system. AI: AI will now build more Advanced radars. AI: First pass of AI personality (aka difficulty) settings. AI: Land platoons will no longer give the defense squad an attack order. AI: Now sends bomber/gunship platoons with a fighter escort. AI: The AI can now once again expand due to low buildable space. AI: Server perf improvemnents. AI: The AI will now get notified when someone initiates a planet smash. AI: Fix for AI being unable to launch planets at other planets. AI: AI now uses the neural network when looking form places to attack. AI: Added neural network fitness function. AI: Added neural network support for the AI land attack task. AI: Added some Commander self-preservation. Animation: Make tank units not scroll treads when attached to a transport. Art: Small polish pass on radar units Art: Adjusted the amount of team color on the energy and metal storage units Art: Radar_satellite_adv art revision Art: Orbital_fighter art redesign Art: Fix long time issue with several projectiles being overly dark. Max files had gamma correction turned on which caused the render to texture to output darkened textures. Art: polished art for radar_satellite Art: Fix water shader's normals not rendering properly. Art: Trimmed the teleporter building down to a much smaller building Art: Ice feature and crack texture improvements Balance: The number of potential metal spot clusters will now increase as planet size increases. Balance: The system editor 'metal density' and 'metal cluster' sliders now have an effect on planet metal spot generation. Yay! Chrono-cam: Replays and end-of-game reviews no longer snap to the end of the game and stop just because you exit out of the chrono-cam controls (was a by-product of the live-game "resume" behavior for exiting chrono-cam, which is undesirable for replays/reviews). Engine: Beam particles Engine: Particle LOD added back with support for multiple viewports. Engine: Merge proto/graphics to main. This merge includes the finalization of the GPU-ization of trail particles. All particle rendering functionality is now on the GPU. Engine: Runtime shader recompilation. This restores previous functionality where shaders are recompiled at runtime if they change. This change also tracks shader header files, so you can change a shader header and all shaders that use it will rebuild. Engine: Trail/string particles on the GPU. The last CPU-based particle system is no more. Yay. Engine: Fixed various GPU particle orientation bugs, so they now act per spec. FX: Adding sort of working jets to orbital lander. FX: Adding flight effects back on aircraft. FX: Updating rendering system to handle dielectric specular (white specular). FX: Encodes specular exponent as either white specular range or diffuse color specular range. Units can determine if surface is metal or not via a mask in the blue channel of their material texture. Terrain and features are always dielectric for now as they use that blue channel for emissive masking. FX: Change specular from blinn phong to GGX (Disney's specular lobe). Gameplay: Fix force landings on the server so it works with multi-planet spawns. Also change the force landing timeout back to 2 minutes. Gameplay: Fix orbital fabber build arm tool to include a pitch/yaw range so it can actually repair Gameplay/FX: Change beam weapons back to not always hitting their target even if they miss legitimately. Fix bug causing them to miss to begin with. Was using old positional data, now getting current position. Gameplay: Fix for units with ballistic projectiles missing wildly while changing directions. Pathing: Fixed orbital not circling when fabbing Pathing: Fix for nav agents not getting a flow field, which resulted in them steering towards their goal and running into buildings and terrain and getting stuck. Pathing: Free Form Formations Pathing: Fix for groups getting split up and units not waiting for eachother. UI: Ambient Occlusion: off -> on, HDR: off -> on, Selection Icons: off -> on UI: We've secretly changed Timmy's selection boxes to circles, lets see if he notices. UI: New orbital unit icons UI: Fix mouse not working when focused on the sun. UI: Revise system designer to use new UI styling UI: Updated econ bar overflow color. UI: Updated spectator panel econ overflow color.
Bugs fixed/closed in this release: PA#2756 - Game doesn't save/apply Antialiasing option in game settings PA#2897 - Software UI broken on all platforms PA#2959 - Orbital fabricators not assisting/repair correctly PA#3038 - Saving camera Anchor also preserves panning state PA#3105 - Orbital fabbers can't build on wreckages PA#3117 - Zoom to Celestial (default: space bar) is broken PA#3259 - Area buildings for metal extractors expose taken spots without recon PA#3306 - After reconnect water structures use land models PA#3312 - Units stuck in and under the teleporter Partially fixed or improved: PA#3306 - Planet select menu out of sync after group or camera anchor hotkeys used. ... Group recall no longer cause desync, but camera anchor still do that.
Update!!!!! and first comment wohoo apparently i got all the badges might be bug because i really dont have them all.
UI Changes New Armory screen Unit Changes Aircraft All Aircraft Added movement fx jets Advanced Transport "Pelican" Added audio cues for load/unload Advanced Gunship "Kestrel" Updated weapon fire audio cue Structures Teleporter New Model Orbital All Orbital Units Shows team-coloured line down to position on the ground. Orbital Fabrication Bot New Model Avenger New Model Other Orbital Factory Not buildable, but model included in game files (in-progress)
Badge ownership is a UI bug. No one actually owns them who doesn't, it's just not making the distinction between "Do I own it or not", so it's not clear who owns what in this build.
I played around with it for a bit and I dont really get how the unit organization works , can anyone explain how to do it?
I think one of the funniest things I've encountered with this build, is that the ant has been renamed to Unit Cannon, is this where you're hiding the feature?
That's not new to this build - it was in the previous build The Ant has gone through a number of name changes. In no particular order: Histericles Titanium Insect Pounder Alleged Tank UTC-8 Unit Cannon
No, the balance changes aren't in this build. Given the playtests and livestream though, I imagine it's not far off.
So, the Addendum section. How useful/interesting is that part to people? That was a pretty work intensive project on my part, but if people find it useful, let me know.
Some UI/art changes are usually covered by @raevn or can be noticed in-game so I suppose those less important. @sorian also share quite a lot of info, but not all of this available in his topic. I suppose engine, pathing, FX and AI is extremely interesting to see what's in progress at moment. Please keep posting this!
I think that part is really useful. Knowing what to look for change-wise rather than stumbling upon things means we can have more meaningful input into what's changing
i'm still befuddled as to what exactly the new "command and control" things are and how they work, care to input some clarification?
I think you include slightly more information than raevn can. I don't think he would have known for sure or not the AI information for instance. So if you happen to know that is in a build and can post in notes, please continue doing so Garat. holding down click while issueing a group move command allows you to draw their end spot. Draw a line, they will line up on it. Holding shift click when selecting a group also did... something, forgot the notes... OH YEAH, you can draw the path of movement to the move command.
This. My focus is on specifics, mostly unit balance, UI and model changes - anything I can see directly from comparing files. But any changes to the engine, or changes like the AI where the resulting behaviour is complex, can't be easily determined.
